In a short time he came back with Clarice, who threw herself upon her knees beside her brother and called upon him frantically to speak to her, or give some sign that he knew her. The sight of his white, bloodstained face had roused all the affection she ever felt for him, and made her regret the harshness with which she had treated him. She did not ask how it happened. She assumed it was suicide, and wondered why he did it.
Gradually the crowd disappeared to talk the matter over in the street and at their own houses. The lodgers, too, had gone to their rooms after offering to stay if they were needed. Miss Hansford declined their offers peremptorily. She wanted to be alone, and when all were gone except the doctors, Clarice and Paul, she went up stairs to Elithe, whom she found upon the floor, with her head upon the window sill, sobbing convulsively.
“Elithe,” she began. “You saw him throw the revolver away. Tell me just where he stood,—which way he threw it, and about how far.”
“He stood by the stump where some nasturtiums are growing,” Elithe replied. “His face was away from me,—to the west. He threw with his right hand. Oh, Auntie, he didn’t mean it. What will they do with him?”
“The Lord only knows;—hang him, perhaps! If you had held your tongue nobody would have connected him with it,” was Miss Hansford’s reply, as she left Elithe writhing on the floor in an agony of remorse and fear.
The moon had gone down and clouds, which threatened rain, were scudding across the sky, adding to the darkness of the underbrush, where a woman was moving cautiously, feeling every inch of ground, every stone and clump of grass, and whispering to herself, “I must find it,—I must.” Her hands were cut with briars,—her dress was draggled and wet, when she at last abandoned the search and returned to the house, where the doctors, with Clarice and Paul, were keeping their anxious watch.
CHAPTER XXVII.
ELITHE AND JACK PERCY.
Elithe had sat upstairs in the darkness praying that Jack Percy might live, or if he died, that no harm might come to Paul. Hearing no sound from below, and anxious to know how matters were, she ventured down at last. In the confusion she had seen only the outline of Jack’s face and this in semi-darkness. Now, as she entered the room she had a full view of it as he lay on his back, with the light of a lamp falling upon it. Clarice was sitting with her head upon a table,—Paul at the foot of the lounge, and a doctor on either side, nodding in their chairs and paying no attention either to Miss Hansford or Elithe, until startled by a loud cry from the latter.
“It’s Mr. Pennington! How came he here?” and, throwing out her arms, Elithe dropped by the side of the couch as if she had been shot. “Mr. Pennington,” she repeated, “you must not die; you shall not.”
In an instant Clarice and Paul and the doctors were on their feet, stupefied with what they heard and the sight of Elithe kneeling by Jack Percy and calling him Mr. Pennington. Very slowly Jack’s eyes opened and turned towards her with a look of ineffable tenderness which each one in the room noticed. Then they closed again, as if the effort to keep them open were too great, and, moving his hand very slowly towards her, he whispered, faintly: “Elithe.”